Cloud Buyouts Create AI Vendor Lock‑In

Major cloud providers are converting partnerships into near‑exclusive financing and compute guarantees — here Google’s $10B up front plus $30B conditional and a 5 GW compute deal with Anthropic — which makes AI labs economically and operationally dependent on a single provider. That dependency shifts market power, shapes product roadmaps, and raises geopolitical and regulatory stakes about control of frontier capabilities. — If cloud firms can lock top AI labs through trillion‑scale compute and revenue arrangements, competition, national security, and regulatory approaches to AI governance will all need to adjust.